As my previous post has suggested, I've been working on a Dead Space necromorphs mod for some time. It's very near to its first debut among my closest friends and has most of its content and concepts finalized. I'm focusing now on getting some of its core gameplay concepts smoothed over (hardy and fast melee troops, slow and virtually unkillable bosses) and, while it's not crashing anymore, it's nowhere near perfect.

My biggest problem is that the necromorphs just aren't scary enough in a number of ways. Without further delay, here's the short list on what I need help figuring out:

- Aggression
-- As it stands, the necromorphs simply do not make focused attacks on enemies and often uselessly take cover from incoming fire. I need to know what controls the AI's decision-making when it comes to making suicidal charges and which direction those values need to go.
- Solved!
-- As mentioned later in the thread, I did some investigating on The Time After's zombie AI file and got the necromorphs running headlong into death and dismemberment just the way they needed to be. I also did some additional modification to help; most necromorphs can't form squads and, with few that actually can, they run off on their own with even less regard for their safety. This was done via the "squad_size_xp_cap" parameter in their troop classes.

- Numbers
-- In order for a wholly melee-based faction to be viable in a game like Running With Rifles, they need to have a heck of a lot of troops. I've made some haphazard attempts at doing so (namely, vehicle troop offsets), but they haven't worked very well. Where I can adjust the troop capacity for the necromorphs and the necromorphs only (especially as this mod is already campaign-enabled) is the second item on my checklist.
- Solved!
-- Sort of, anyways. I figured out that the troop offsets do, in fact, work the way I thought and, as mentioned later, implemented a gore pile "vehicle" deployed by specific necromorphs. This meant that combat would slowly cause their numbers to pile up further and further. After playtesting, however, the combination of improved aggression and an overboard increase in numbers made it virtually impossible to win against the space zombies.

- Atmosphere
-- Dead Space always struck me with its rich audio/visual presentation and I want to at least live up to the first part of that combination. I've already secured appropriate sound effects, but I've had little luck in making much progress here. What I need to know is how to make troops randomly emit sounds and use custom death sounds - whether by workaround or otherwise.
- Solved!
-- As mentioned later in the thread, I came up with the idea of "screambombs" that "explode" into murderous screaming as soon as they're thrown. I'd also taken to using short-lived tokens given to all necromorphs that emit custom death sounds when dropped.

The less important, but still helpful questions to ask part of this thread follow. Also included are some ideas I've used in the mod that have been less-than-ideal solutions to two of the above problems.


I figure that there are enough zombie mods floating around out there that someone might've found the sweet spot for stuff like this. Anyone?

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I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Heh, the first thing I thought about when I saw "invulnerable miniboss" without looking at the contents of the post was "that bloody regenerating necromorph and the eye surgery scene".

I believe with some fancy editing of the AI file, you can create an AI that doesn't seek cover (or, at least, rarely does), and one that will attack with melee as soon as it gets close enough. Hoever, if you check out the zombie mods, you'll see that the AI without a weapon already charges the player in a suicidal manner. But mind you, that's literally coded without a weapon (as in, they have no primaries, secondaries, or grenades)- which can get tricky when a player wants to be a necromorph.

As for numbers, you can simply put in a note for the player to change the enemy faction spawn numbers when setting up the game. You can check out the Running with the Dead mod for how to change faction numbers, but it requires you link a certain layer of map - and not all vanilla maps are made equal.


Changing the universal vehicles will require you to edit the map spawns. It's not too difficult, the hard part is making the map load without it lagging to high hell the very first time you tinker with Inkscape.

You can quicken the melee speed by increasing the speed of the melee animation. And since you can change the specific animations (like the melee animation) via .character files, it won't interfere with the non-necromorph characters. A quick test for this would be to copy the melee animation, change the speed number to something higher, and then copy the character file and edit the animation swapper at the bottom (and then assigning the character file to a specific soldier in a faciton file).

I'm not familiar with soldier_capacity_offset, but I'm pretty sure it should work. It might not be noticeable, however. Try exaggerating the numbers to thoroughly test it.

Dummy guns - I'll have to put some though into that. Incomplete thought: You can work around the "lots of angry zombie sounds consumable" generator bit by making a new melee animation and perhaps assigning a sound to it.

I did some looking at The Time After's AI settings and tweaked my own to better fit the necromorphs. I've also been working with detectability for them; by default, necromorphs are a little harder to detect than normal characters, which allows them to get closer to targets that much easier. So far, so good, as it appears that I've achieved the level of aggression and brutality the space zombies need.

I had an idea as I was going along, as well. Early on, I found out that it's possible for deployables to spawn soldiers instead of vehicles. In a sort of backwards reasoning, I hit a spot of inspiration implementing a bunch of "old" necromorph spawners onto the pregnant class.
If deployables spawn vehicles and vehicles can have troop offsets, what's keeping me from making the necromorphs deploy bundles of meat that slowly increase their troop capacity as the battle goes on? It fits perfectly in line with the way a typical zombie apocalypse or necromorph outbreak unfolds; without quick and heavy-handed scorched earth tactics, the "seed population" rapidly spirals into a full-fledged extinction event.

I need to do more testing on this. I haven't yet seen my space zombies slather the battlefield in gore (constructively, at least), so I assume I did something wrong in working them in. Regardless, however, with their new-and-improved suicidal determination, I've noticed them doing much better than before. They've managed to hit usual stalemate points and even come close to breaking through (in example, east-to-west on Keepsake Bay, breaking out of the east beach resort).

I've still yet to work out how to get them to make a racket while they're doing it, though. I need to consider just how problematic it would be having the old-styled screaming guns on them again and add in better prevalence of their sound-on-drop items.

On that note, I would like to ask another question with a focus on animations. I can see "<control key="swing" value="1" />" and "<control key="action" value="1" />" present in the stab animation, but I'm not entirely sure what either does. I would presume, at least, that "action" controls when the stab has struck any potential targets nearby, but how do I tell the animation what sound to use?

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I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Heh, you can also get grenades to spawn soldiers. Might be better than a deployable. I figured that out a few days ago when working on deployable, hovering drones.


Yea, that was an incomplete thought of mine. The "swing" controls when the swoosh sound of the animation happens, and the "action" is when the damage effect takes place. You can remove the "swing" line of code from the human's knife animation (since it's a relatively quiet sound), and then make a new special sound effect in place of the swing in the sounds folder for the necromorphs that only plays when they melee. But for the life of me, I can't find the knife sound.

Alright, I know I'm double posting, but to get your attention - the knifing sound is the same sound as throwing a grenade (or, "grenade_throw1.wav" in the files). So, if you're willing to have horrible necromorph sounds play whenever you chuck a grenade or when a necromorph tries to rip your head off, that's good.

So, change that sound to your horrible necromorh scream, make a separate animation for humans and remove the line of code that has "swing" in it.

I actually mashed it up between your suggestion on spawn grenades and my own prior attempts at making a scream-cannon. It couldn't be simpler, really; a dummy grenade that "explodes" into a necromorph scream as soon as it's thrown and does nothing more. It's worked out for the best as it has none of the prior AI problems that the noise guns had.

Which raises another question; is it possible to set a grenade type to be infinite?

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

No - but it is possible to sort of cheat your way past that due to how you spawn with grenades (you always spawn with one less than the maximum amount of grenades you can carry). Set the capacity value of rank 0 to be something like 999 and that should effectively solve it. You also might want to make it so they don't get dropped - look at the base_weapon file and copy the "drop_count_factor_on_death="1.0"" bit over to the grenade and edit it so that it's 0.

Looking forward to the release of this mod. A bit terrified, too.

Here's a new one that's been upsetting me for a while.

While the mod has been going well so far and it's been appropriately balanced (which was absolute Hell since the necromorphs were insanely overpowered in their initial state), there's one little thing that's been nagging me since I made it.

I introduced the infector via some animation swapping and, while it's working unexpectedly well, its visual appearance is not. It's not quite the model or the animations, but the fact that the character is flat-out disappearing from sight when viewed at certain camera angles. I've reason to believe this may have something to do with the fact that it uses prone animations for normal movement, but I have absolutely no idea how to fix it - if I even can.

Has anyone bumped into this problem before? Is there any way I can fix it or at least reduce its frequency?

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

I've bumped into this before. At the time, it related to the model not satisfying all the bone points - pretty much means that all of the animation dots you see in the editor need to have a least one voxel linked to it.